A protestor gestures toward the White House on the Ellipse near the South Lawn of the White House during the Women's March on Washington January 21, 2017 in Washington, DC. Large crowds are attending the anti-Trump rally a day after U.S. President Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th U.S. president. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Angel Taylor Hill attends Angel Taylor Hill introduces the new Tease Dreamer Fragrance Collection at Victoria's Secret on March 12, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Victoria's Secret)

A man is silhouetted as he stands on a walkway in the sky lobby at the Chancellery, the seat of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (not pictured) in Berlin, May 7, 2014. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, a 39-year-old Briton named Larry Burrows began work on a feature for LIFE magazine, chronicling the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops on the ground – and in the air – in the midst of the rapidly widening war. The photographs in this gallery focus on a calamitous March 31, 1965, helicopter mission; Burrows’ “report from Da Nang”, featuring his pictures and his personal account of the harrowing operation, was published two weeks later as a now-famous cover story in the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE.

Photo: Man your battle stations: The crew chief of helicopter Yankee Papa 13, lance corporal James C. Farley, mans an M-60 machine gun during a mission near Da Nang, Vietnam on March 31, 1965. (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures)

Ramoncito Campo kisses his wife Hernelie Ruazol Campo on a flooded street during a southwest monsoon that battered Manila August 8, 2012. The newly-wed couple pushed through with their scheduled wedding despite severe flooding that inundated wide areas of the capital and nearby nine provinces. (Photo by Reuters/Courtesy of Ramoncito Campo)

Men push a motorbike through a street flooded by a river that overflowed from heavy rains caused by Hurricane Matthew in Leogane, Haiti, Wednesday, October 5, 2016. Rescue workers in Haiti struggled to reach cutoff towns and learn the full extent of the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Matthew as the storm began battering the Bahamas on Wednesday and triggered large-scale evacuations along the U.S. East Coast. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)

VIETNAM: A Vietnamese woman, wearing the traditional “ao dai” long dress, poses for photos along peach blossom flowers ahead of the Vietnamese “Tet” (Lunar New Year festival), in a field in Hanoi, Vietnam, February 2, 2016. (Photo by Reuters/Kham)

Job seekers carry a woman who fainted at the Indonesia Spectacular Job Fair 2015 at Gelora Bung Karno stadium in Jakarta August 12, 2015. Indonesia's gross domestic product grew at 4.67 percent in the second quarter, its slowest pace in six years. Since he took office last October, Widodo's government has passed a raft of measures aimed at boosting industry and consumption that have been criticized by investors as protectionist. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)